Then she asks, voice rough, “The baby?”
“Alive,” I say at once. “He’s in neonatal care. Early, but alive.”
Her eyes close. One tear slips free anyway.
I sit down and take her hand. She holds on weakly, but she holds on.
“A boy,” I add quietly.
A faint, tired smile touches her mouth. “You know.”
“Yes.”
“I was going to tell you before it came to this,” she says.
I look at her. “When?”
She lets out a breath that might have been a laugh if she had more strength for it. “Eventually.”
“That’s not a real answer.”
“No,” she admits. “It isn’t.”
The room goes still again.
She’s looking at me differently now. Not the panic from before surgery. Not the fear. Something softer, more uncertain. Likenow that death didn’t take the choice from us, she has to face all the things she said when she thought it might.
I brush my thumb once over the back of her hand. “You scared me,” I say.
Her lashes lower. “You scared me, too.”
Fair.
A silence stretches, and then she says, very quietly, “What you said before…”
I feel the shift in my own body instantly. I stand before I can stop myself. The chair scrapes softly against the floor.
She blinks at me. “Aleksei?”
I turn away, because the truth is I don’t know what to do with tenderness when it stops being a crisis and starts becoming a life. Because if she is about to tell me she didn’t mean it, I don’t want to watch her do it from six inches away. Because everything in me is hanging by threads, and I am suddenly not sure which words will save me and which ones will finish the job.
So I take one step toward the door. And then she says it.
“I love you too.”
I stop. The words hit the middle of my back like a bullet.
For one second, I can’t move at all.
Then I turn around slowly.
She’s watching me from the bed, pale and tired and still wearing the marks of everything that’s happened, and there is nothinguncertain in her face now. Fear, yes. Exhaustion. But not uncertainty.
“You heard me,” she says softly.
I go back to the bed.
I lean down, one hand braced carefully beside her shoulder, the other coming up to cup her face as gently as if she might break. “Say it again.”
